Swedish Officials Complained To US That Hollywood-Pushed IPRED 'Anti-Piracy' Law Did More Harm Than Good

from the nicely-done,-us dept

Back in May, we had reported that Swedish police were complaining about the IPRED "anti-piracy" law, noting that all it had really done was driven up the use of encryption, which had made their job more difficult. Separate from that, of course, have been numerous studies showing that the amount of file sharing in Sweden, after an initial dip, quickly surpassed what it had been before and continued to rise. Of course, this was all pretty predictable before IPRED went into effect, but thanks to Wikileaks, not only do we know that the US was heavily involved in pushing efforts like IPRED through, but that Swedish officials made these concerns known to the US, and it appears that the US didn't really care. The specific cable highlighted the concerns of Swedish officials:

Swedish Police Enforcement officials are complaining that implementation of the IPRED has made it more difficult to solve crimes. Swedish Internet Service Providers are saving user information related to IP-numbers for a shorter period of time following the IPRED legislation.

Also, as previously reported (Ref A) the IPRED legislation might be doing little to stop the problem of illegal file-sharing as internet users now are using services which allow them to hide their IP-addresses.

That same cable, by the way, also mentions how Larry Lessig spoke to the Swedish Parliament, and also reported on the latest (at the time) of the Pirate Bay trial.

Separately, I just realized that the cable comes from the US Ambassador to Sweden, Matthew Barzun, who actually probably has a decent grasp on many of these issues, as before he became a diplomat, he worked for many years as an executive at CNET. That said, it's still somewhat disappointing that the US did seem so instrumental in pushing these laws, that even the Swedes don't seem to like, which aren't helping, and are having other unintended consequences. What's really troubling is that the US still seems to support these types of laws elsewhere, even though they're likely to have the same results. Is keeping Hollywood happy really so important?

Reader Comments

Re: Re: Re:

Assange will need to face his charges no matter what, and for him to offer to suppress cables in exchange for making it all go away would be anathema to his soul.

They are playing up the angle that he is a bad bad man. Sadly these are just "charges" not convictions. But people want to parade the charges around to prove how horrible a person he is. This effort to spin these charges is to distract attention from little things, like the US taxpayers paying nearly 2 billion a year to a company that has been caught multiple times pimping children. That the government has acted to cover up this pimping several times.

The cables are fact, and other than bluster and chest thumping the Government has not disproven a single one of them. They try to distract people with the idea people might die because of what he did, we will face more problems with our allies, and a grand farce ensues. Yet we are still paying a company that thinks its perfectly ok to pimp and sell children and our government still works to hide this pimping.

Assange might have done something to violate the law in Sweden with these women, I dunno Swedish law enough to debate it. One is left to wonder how the case went from active to dismissed to active and being leaked in the papers as these cables came to light. Maybe a government somewhere exerted more pressure to get their way.